Yume

Yume, meaning dream, is lettered across the upper facade of the central block at a public housing estate in Yubari, beneath a large teal circular mural and a smaller brown one. Bare white-barked trees and a leaning utility pole stand in the foreground, puddles on the asphalt catching flat overcast light, while a long row of low sheds follows the grassy slope between the buildings. The lettering is the kind of detail that registers only once the street around it has fallen quiet enough to look at it properly. Yubari's concrete public housing blocks were built during the peak population era, when the city held more than 107,000 residents. Standard construction across the district ran to three and five storeys: flat roofs, external stairwells, concrete balconies. The buildings were built to hold mining families, and for a time they did. Coal mining in the Yubari basin began in the early 1890s under the Hokkaido Colliery and Railway Company. By 1953, approximately 19,500 miners worked the city's seams. The energy policy shift from coal to oil that followed Japan's 1960 census began a decline that would prove irreversible. The last coal mine in Yubari, the Mitsubishi Minami-Oyubari Mine, closed on 30 March 1990, ending a century of extraction. The population that year was 20,969. The city attempted a pivot to tourism through the 1980s and 1990s, borrowing to build theme parks, ski resorts, and hotels. The strategy did not produce enough revenue. On 6 March 2007, Yubari filed for fiscal rehabilitation with debts of approximately 35.3 billion yen, becoming the only city in modern Japan to do so. The blocks in this frame are products of the boom years. Across the city, every unheated Hokkaido winter drives snow load into the roof structure and water into the timber framing. The lettering holds its ground across the facade. The photograph was made in 2016.